problem with USB 2.0 controller and Adaptec ATA RAID in same system

Guest

I have an ASUS Socket A M/B machine with 266 Mhz FSB, integrated
peripherals, including audio and video. I'm trying to add a USB 2.0
controller and have been partially succussful.

The new USB 2.0 adapter is in PCI slot 2. In PCI slot 1 is an Adaptec
1200A RAID controller, which stopped working after I installed the USB
2.0 adapter. The USB 2.0 adapter works; I used ghost 9.0 to restore
my drive after a failure using an external USB drive plugged into the
new USB 2.0 adapter.

Now the Adaptec RAID controller shows a problem in Device Manager, and
when I try to reinstall the driver I get this error:

------------
There was a problem installing this hardware:
Mass Storage Controller

An error occurred during the installation of the device:

The driver installation file for this device is missing a
necessary entry. This may be because th INF was written
for Windows 95 or later. Contact your hardware vendor.
----------------

Of course in reality there is nothing wrong with the .INF or .SYS
files; they were working just fine before I installed the new USB card.
The Adaptec windows monitoring software says that there is no RAID
controller present.

My system has USB 1.1 onboard and after a recent drive failure i
finally decided not to wait 8 hours for USB 1.1 (that's how long it
used to take to do the backups, so I figured the restore would take
just as long). So I bought the USB 2.0 adapter and the restore took
very little time.

Unfortunately, I had to plug my new disk drive into the onboard IDE
because with the USB 2.0 card in PCI slot 2, the RAID controller
doesn't work with windows any more.

In the BIOS, I tried disabling the USB 1.1 onboard controller, no help.
I tried playing with a lot of different IRQ combinations for PCI slot
1 and 2. However, whenever I choose an IRQ for PCI slot 1, the USB
controller takes the IRQ I give it for slot 2 BUT also takes the IRQ
for PCI slot 1, FORCING a conflict every time.

I cannot use USB keyboard and mouse now; I am forced to use PS/2
keyboard and mouse. The system doesn't recognize the keyboard/mouse in
the new USB 2.0 card, and I was having problems depending on which IRQ
I chose with it recognizing them in the onboard USB 1.1 ports (which
are now disabled to try to simplify debugging this problem). However,
the USB keyboard and mouse did work fine in the USB 1.1 port when
booting from the Ghost CD-ROM to do the restore. So it isn't anything
obvious like a loose cable or faulty keyboard/mouse.

When I go into windows and look at the PCI USB 2.0 card in device
manager, I can see that it is not using those IRQs that I assigned at
all. It is using IRQ 16/18, but on the BIOS splash screen it says that
it is using IRQ 10/5. I selected 5 for the Adaptec RAID. If I
select 9 for Adaptec RAID then it will have IRQ 9 but the USB 2 adapter
will have 10/9. I can't seem to find a way to avoid that conflict.

The funny thing is that the Ghost CD-ROM boot doesn't have a problem
with this hardware configuration. The BIOS has the problem that my USB
keyboard/mouse don't work depending on which IRQs I set for the new USB
controller (so I can't use that keyboard in the BIOS screens) and
Windows XP also has a problem because the usb keyboard/mouse don't work
AND the Adaptec controller is not recognized.

BTW, I can see that the Adaptec controller is working fine if I go into
its BIOS settings by pressing ctrl-H on startup. Also, it was working
fine before I installed the new USB adapter.

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Guest

The problem turned out to be the way I was installing the Adaptec
driver. Their driver INF file ships with a different manufacturer's
name, that is the manufacturer that they based the driver on. As it
turns out, if you click "Browse" and give a pathname to the folder with
the INF file, it chooses that other manufacturer's name, and then it
complains about something missing in the driver file.

So instead of clicking on "Browse", right below it If you click on the
"Don't Search, I will choose the driver to install" and then click on
the "Have Disk" button instead, even though you are browsing to the
same place, it then finds the Adaptec name and installs the driver just
fine.

So there was no IRQ conflict causing problems with the RAID controller.
There is a conflict with legacy USB device operation (keyboard and
mouse) in the BIOS screens, though. If I leave the USB 2.0 card in the
system, even if I change the legacy USB device settings from Primary to
Secondary, the USB keyboard and mouse do not work in the BIOS screens.
So I can't even press the DEL key to enter the BIOS screen or just
press any key to tell the PC to boot from CD-ROM when it prompts me.
So for now I gave up on having USB 2.0 ports in this system and just
pulled the card.

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